Scheer Climate Plan ‘Like Building a House Without a Hammer’, Mirrors Fossil Industry Campaign Demands

More than a year after he
promised it, and after weeks of mounting hype, Conservative leader Andrew
Scheer released his party’s climate plan Wednesday, a glossy, 60-page document
with no fixed carbon reduction target that he cast as Canada’s best shot at
meeting its 2030 goal under the Paris Agreement.

“We have done a lot of
analysis,” Scheer told
media, during a staged event in picturesque Chelsea, Quebec. “We have
talked to a lot of stakeholders and experts, and we are very confident that
this approach will give Canada the best chance of achieving those Paris
targets.”

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“It’s like trying to build a
house without a hammer,” responded Canadians
for Clean Prosperity Executive Director Michael Bernstein. “Any credible plan
to tackle climate change would include a carbon tax. Instead, Andrew Scheer’s plan is going to
cost Canadians more and take away the rebates that help families cope.”

“Andrew Scheer’s climate plan
will strip households in five provinces of thousands of dollars in rebates,
ignores the best tool we have to address climate change,” said the organization
previously led by Stephen Harper’s former research director, in a release
Wednesday that laid out a detailed critique of the plan. “By removing the
carbon tax, Scheer’s plan eliminates thousands in rebates that could have
helped families reduce their carbon footprint.” [Really. Take a minute. Click
through and read the whole thing.—Ed.]

The plan, apparently aligned
with early June recommendations from the Canadian fossil lobby, “would compel facilities that produce 40
kilotonnes of emissions or more per year to invest in green tech,” CBC reports,
enabling Scheer to argue that his party would apply its plan to a wider swath
of businesses than the governing Liberals. “The Trudeau government’s current
rules impose emission caps on firms that emit more than 50 kilotonnes per year.”

But “Scheer’s proposed
penalties for emitters would be framed very differently from the current government’s
carbon tax. The idea is to keep the funds in the private sector instead of
collecting them in government coffers,” the national broadcaster said, citing a
Conservative party insider. “The policy document says those required
investments from offending companies would go into the research, development,
and adoption of emissions-reducing technology in that particular industry. Contributions
could be used to fund research at Canadian universities, or to support Canadian
clean tech companies.”

“The approach is similar to recommended
actions from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), Canada’s
largest oil lobby group, which published a list of recommendations for the 2019
election on June 3,” Observer writes.

[Spin alert: With just 11 years and a few months
remaining to hit the IPCC’s rapid decarbonization deadline by 2030, climate
plans that emphasize research rather than deployment can usually be decoded to mean
carbon capture and storage technologies designed to prop up the fossil
industries. The energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies that are
needed to hit ambitious climate targets are ready for prime time, and any
regular reader of The Mix knows
they’re already less expensive than fossil fuels in more and more places.—Ed.]

“Under Scheer’s plan,” CBC
adds, “every tonne over the 40-kilotonne standard would cost the polluter a set
amount. The more a company emits over that threshold, the more it would be
required to invest.” Under Environment Canada’s GHG Reporting Program, 1,622
large emitters—more than one-third of them from the fossil industry—accounted for
292 million tonnes of carbon pollution in 2017, about 41% of the country’s
total.

“Mining and oil and gas have
been the only sectors to increase emissions since 2005,” CBC notes.

Crucially, “Scheer’s plan does
not project the amount by which each proposed initiative would lower Canada’s
carbon pollution,” National Observer reports. “Party officials speaking on
background could not offer any supplementary material or academic studies that
examine the proposals’ effectiveness in terms of impact on pollution,” and Scheer
“didn’t answer directly” when Observer asked him whether the Conservatives had
internal projections attaching specific reductions to each measure.

“Conservatives say their
environmental plan will focus on using technology, not taxes, to reduce
emissions,” CBC writes. “They say Scheer plans to include measures that will
keep businesses competitive while reducing their environmental footprint,” after
consulting “provinces, businesses, and industry experts to ensure the standards
are both fair and enforceable.”

That approach “gives
Canada the best possible chance” of meeting the Paris targets, the Conservative
leader told reporters in Chelsea.

“The plan gives several
examples of what this could look like, such as Canadian green bonds, university
or college programs that focus on clean tech, or start-ups working on carbon capture
or waste heat recovery technology,” Observer writes. “To ensure these
investments ‘reduce harmful emissions’, the plan includes creating a ‘certification
process for all investments’ called the Green Investment Standards
Certification, that would require a ‘technical assessment’.”

Reporter Carl Meyer compares
that frame to CAPP’s federal election demand for a “large-emitter framework
that prioritizes investment in technology and emissions reduction and achieves
results in a cost-effective manner that protects competitiveness.” The colossal
fossil lobby also stresses “investment in emissions reduction technology in the
oil and natural gas sector.”

For all that Conservatives at
all levels complain about government regulation strangling business, “talk
about red tape?” tweeted
University of Alberta economist Andrew Leach. “Rather than allow trading of
emissions credits to provide an incentive for innovation, this plan allows one
company to invest in another’s facility to receive some credit which is worth
some amount that we don’t yet know, assuming it gets certified?”

“We could very well be
in higher cost, less reduction territory with this plan,” said Carleton
University environmental economist Dave Sawyer.

Environment and Climate Minister
Catherine McKenna called the release a “fake plan”, telling reporters in Ottawa
that “every country needs to take serious action at home. You can’t export
your way out of this problem. You can’t invent your way out of this. You need
to commit to serious action. There is no serious action committed to in this
plan. Canadians expect more. Canadians want to be part of the solution on
climate change.”

“The thing that concerns
me is the lack of conversation around a just transition,” added New
Democrat MP Tracey Ramsey. “So for energy workers who are already
concerned about what’s going to happen to them, we need a clear plan about
what’s going to happen to them, coming off of fossil fuels.”

On CBC, Parliamentary Correspondent
Aaron Wherry notes that Scheer’s release “leaves a lot to the imagination”, containing
the requisite amount of tax-bashing but not much in the way of specifics.

“It is, without question, a
handsome document—in full colour and featuring many large photos. There are
many words in it. Some of them are in large fonts. Others are in italics,” he writes.
“But unfortunately, none of them explain at any point how much the federal
Conservatives hope to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through this plan.”

Yet it was the “length and
weight” of the document that Scheer seemed enthusiastic about during his media
event, Wherry notes. “Sixty pages,” the Conservative leader enthused.
“Eleven thousand words.”

A Conservative government “would
commit $1.8 billion to a two-year program of tax credits for homeowners to
retrofit their homes, effectively reinstating a measure that Stephen Harper’s
government cancelled in 2012. The subsidies are understandably popular with
homeowners, but similar programs have been panned for getting ‘very little bang
for the buck’,” he adds.

“Ten pages in the document
are devoted to conservation efforts. The final 10 pages are committed to
explaining a Conservative commitment to reduce emissions in other countries.”

At present, “the Liberals’
policy for heavy emitters applies to facilities that emit more than 50 kilotonnes
and, in that respect, the Conservatives argue that their policy would have
wider coverage. But under the Liberal plan, facilities that emit less than 50
kt are subject to the carbon levy on fuel. Under the Conservative plan, no
policy would be applied to facilities that emit less than 40 kt.”

But those gaps may be a
function of the group of voters the Conservatives had in mind for their plan, says
CBC pollster Éric Grenier, “an audience quite different from the one Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau addresses when he talks about his government’s plan to
fight climate change.”

A recent survey conducted for
CBC by Public Square Research and Maru/Blue found that “Conservative voters see
the issue in a manner quite distinct from the way it’s viewed by Canadians who
say they will vote for the Liberals, New Democrats, or Greens,” he explains. “Compared
to the bulk of those parties’ supporters—who together represent a majority of
Canadians—Conservative voters say they are less concerned about climate change
and are less willing to make personal sacrifices to fight it.”

Within the Liberal/NDP/Green
voting bloc, the survey found, 78 to 89% “say that humanity’s survival depends
on fighting climate change, or that it should be a top policy priority. Between
94 and 95% of them believe climate change is real and between 83 and 89% of
them say they are prepared to make changes in their daily lives to fight it,”
Grenier writes.

But “just one-third of
Conservative voters say climate change is a top priority or that our survival
depends on fighting it,” he adds. “Another 24% said it was not a priority, while
13% said they don’t believe in [the reality of] climate change in the first
place. While 74 to 86% of Liberal, NDP and Green voters think Canada is not
doing enough to fight climate change, just 36% of Conservatives think the same
thing.”

While majorities of New
Democrat and Green voters and an even larger majority of Liberals support the
federal carbon tax, 85% of Conservatives oppose it, and 69% strongly oppose it.

Those realities have Scheer “fishing
in a smaller climate pond,” Grenier says.

“When asked how much they
would be willing to pay in extra taxes to fight climate change, the majority of
Conservative voters, or 55%, said they would pay nothing at all,” he states. “Between
14 and 19% of Liberal, NDP and Green voters, meanwhile, said they were
unwilling to pay anything.”
Given those numbers, “Scheer’s plan appears designed
to appeal to this base of voters,” the CBC pollster concludes. “Still, the fact
that the party has offered a plan—one that Scheer praised as the ‘most
comprehensive environmental platform ever put forward by a political party in
Canada’—suggests the Conservatives understand that lacking a credible climate
proposal was not an option on the campaign trail.”

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[…] call that system a free pass for polluters, iPolitics notes that CPC leader Andrew Scheer recently proposed an emissions cap for big polluters, with a price per tonne for those that exceed it. He just […]

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